Terry McCarthy
President and CEO
Terry McCarthy was appointed President and CEO of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in July 2012. Prior to that, he traveled the world for television and print media for 27 years, covering politics, business, military, social and environmental issues across the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America. He has managed bureaus in the US and overseas, and set up two bureaus in war zones. He speaks six languages, has won four Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow award.
For CBS News McCarthy spent four months embedded with US Marines in southern Afghanistan for a promoted series “The Thundering Third” which won an Emmy and an Edward R Murrow award in 2011. He followed Egypt’s anti-Mubarak revolution in Cairo, traced the steps of the al Qaeda “underpants bomber” in Yemen, traveled along China’s Silk Road, reported on Shanghai’s real estate boom and did in-depth reporting on cyber attacks on US corporations.
Prior to CBS News, McCarthy was the main Baghdad correspondent for ABC News from 2006 to 2009, covering the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein, the US troop surge in 2007 and the everyday life of the residents of Baghdad in the midst of the war. He also covered life in Mexico City during the swine flu epidemic of 2009. He traveled the length of the Yangtze River in China to examine that country’s economic development, and filmed inside the eye of a category 4 hurricane off Florida in a C 130 hurricane hunter. In 2007 he won an Emmy for a series on how Iraqis viewed their lives 4 years after the US invasion.
Before moving into television McCarthy spent 8 years working for TIME magazine as Shanghai bureau chief and then Los Angeles bureau chief. He wrote about China’s internet and car industries, the fall of Indonesian dictator Suharto and the death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. From LA he did in-depth stories about the Green River serial killer in Seattle, the fight over new oil drilling in Alaska and the science of sharks. Immediately after 9/11 McCarthy went to Afghanistan to cover the ousting of the Taliban from Kabul, and in 2003 he covered the US invasion of Iraq. He set up TIME’s bureaus in Kabul and Baghdad.
From 1987 to 1995 McCarthy was based in Bangkok and then Tokyo for the Independent newspaper of London, where he covered the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble, Aung San Suu Kyi’s campaign for democracy in Burma and civil war in Cambodia. He started his career as a freelance reporter in Central America in 1985. He speaks German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
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